


somewhere in the belly of the beast

by Mx_Carter



Series: i'm never coming home [2]
Category: Hannibal (TV)
Genre: Abigail Hobbs Lives, Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Dark Abigail Hobbs, Gen, M/M, Murder Family, alternate season 3, fucked up people feeling fucked up feelings, sad gay murder interrailing trip
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-02-10
Updated: 2019-02-10
Packaged: 2019-10-20 17:31:00
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,002
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17626571
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Mx_Carter/pseuds/Mx_Carter
Summary: What do you see, Abigail?In some other world, Abigail and Will sail to Europe together, for real. Neither of them are exactly sure what the other wants, or what they want themselves. Neither of them are going to let that get in their way.





	somewhere in the belly of the beast

PALERMO

 

“He’s playing with us.” The words sit like stones in Abigail’s mouth, dull and heavy.

“Always,” Will pronounces. “You still want to go to him?”

Abigail settles herself on the cold stone steps, and considers her answer. She knows what it is, she just wishes, in a wistful sort of way, that it was something different. “Yes.”

She looks over at Will to check his reaction, but his eyes are fixed on the far wall. “He gave you back to me, and then he was going to take you away. Lucy and the football.”

An image of Hannibal crouched on the ground with a football, _Here we go, Charlie Brown_ flashes through Abigail’s head and she can’t help but smile at it.

“What if no-one got hurt?” Will asks, voice soft in the quiet of the chapel. “What if…What if we all left together? Like we were supposed to, after he served the lamb. Where would we have gone?”

“In some other world?”

“In some other world.”

“He said he made a place for us.” Behind her eyes, Abigail sees the dining table in the cliff house, Hannibal talking through his plan with her. The fake IDs, the plane at the private airstrip, the beautiful, secluded house waiting for them in Japan. And from there the whole world, laid out before them. They’d have been like royalty, all the power and none of the responsibilities, totally free to do whatever they wanted.

The vision had been intoxicating when he explained it and only later, lying in bed listening to the waves sigh against the rocks far below, had Abigail begun to wonder. Would she really be free at all, would Will, living in another one of Hannibal’s houses and eating more of his food, covered in the scars he’d given them? Would Hannibal be content with a life like that, a little broken family, and what would he do to her and Will if he did find himself getting bored?

“Do you think he cares about us at all?”

Will opens his arms to her and she leans into him, glad beyond words that he’s here. She doesn’t know anyone else who would understand why she wants so badly for Hannibal to give a shit about her.

“Everything Hannibal does is a game,” Will tells her, “but that doesn’t mean he’s always playing.”

 _He better not be_ , Abigail thinks viciously to herself, head resting on Will’s shoulder.

Glancing down, she catches sight of the pictures Will had dropped onto the steps when he collapsed. He follows her glance and bends to scoop them up, and Abigail finds herself shocked by how casually he handles them. Of course he does, he must have seen hundreds of crime scene photos in his years with the police and the FBI, but even so. Surely these ones are different.

They don’t feel like just photos to her.

Will must pick something up off the way she’s staring, because he shuffles them into some order and offers them to her. “What do you see, Abigail?”

“A dead guy who’s been origami-d into a heart.”

Abigail doesn’t have to look at Will to see him raise an eyebrow – fair enough, that was a bit _too_ teenager-y, she’s just not sure how to refuse him without explaining the weird twist in her stomach that comes at the idea of looking any closer. “I’m not you, I dont have your empathy. Not seeing any shadows suspended on dust, even if I squint.”

Will sighs and shakes his head. “You have plenty of empathy, more than most people. When you manipulate people, use your knowledge of their thoughts and actions to get them to do what you want them to, that’s empathy in action. You also have your own unique perspective, on murder and on Hannibal, so. What do you see?”

It's always slightly uncomfortable when Will sees through her like that, and it happens more and more these days. Abigail looks away and makes herself stare at the bloody mass in the photos. Into her head drifts the sense memory of cleaning a deer carcass, holding the heart in her hands, slick and cooling muscle. Bigger than a human’s, Dad had said. She can imagine how the finished product would feel, reconstruct it from her memory. Imagine how it would feel to Hannibal. He would have lingered, after setting up. Not long, but long enough to put his hand on in. He’d have taken off his gloves, she’s suddenly sure of it – he’d have wanted to touch his design, feel the cool slickness, imagine it beating under his palm.

Hearts mean love, she thinks. Even when you’re as pretentious as Hannibal, that’s still the basic symbolism. So when you make a heart out of a whole human torso, that means something about love. It’s obvious that Hannibal left his kill here for her and Will to find, which means it’s a message to them, specifically.

Splintered bones, muscle stripped raw and exposed, impaled on the swords holding it up. A _broken_ heart, Hannibal’s broken heart, like Will said.

That’s the message, she’s sure of it, but as Hannibal’s messages go it’s a pretty obvious one. Abigail finds herself more interested in what’s underneath it. Specifically, that Hannibal carted a corpse all the way from wherever he and Bedelia Du Maurier are holed up to Palermo, that he risked sneaking into a busy tourist destination in order to display it properly, in the exact perfect place. There’s no logical reason this should have been so important to him, that he’d be willing to do something so dangerous. Hannibal’s impulsive, sure; he’s not _this_ impulsive.

Or at least, he wasn’t before that night in his kitchen.

“I see a deer with a wound in his flank,” Abigail says, not sure if she’s speaking to Will or Hannibal or herself. “He struts and waves his antlers to try and hide it, but there’s blood everywhere. He’s scared and angry, so he’s lashing out.”

“Is he weakening?”

“I don’t know if he’s weakening exactly, but something’s changed. You described his other displays as, I don’t know, cold? Pointed? Not very emotional. This is kind of the exact opposite of that.”

“He tried to leave us, but he kept coming back. He tried to cut us out, but the wound hasn’t closed like he thought it would.” Will looks like he’s about to say something else, but then the door to the chapel swings open.

They both turn to look – Abigail can’t help but hold her breath – but it’s just the guy who was talking to Will at the police station. Abigail had been allowed to wait by the entrance, with only a harried-looking receptionist to keep an eye on her. Evidently Will had been more interesting than her.

“Signore Graham,” the man says, “I though I might find you here.” He glances at her, and then his eyes settle. Not on her face; even from across the chapel she can see his gaze is slightly off, slightly lower. Over the past few years, Abigail’s gotten good at telling when someone’s looking at the scar on her neck. It’s fainter now, faded from red to white, but still noticeable, especially if you’re looking for it. This guy must have done his homework.

 Will must catch it too. “Abigail,” he says, “this is Chief Investigator Rinaldo Pazzi, all the way from Florence. He’s…acquainted with this case.”

“I’m acquainted with the man who is responsible, for this and for other murders,” Pazzi says, coming forward to shake her hand. His grip is dry and hot, and just slightly too tight. “As are you both.”

“You were acquainted with him as a teenager,” Will disagrees. “He’s all grown up now.”

“And you two have known him since.” Pazzi steps closer to them, and Abigail finds herself shrinking back a little, from Pazzi and from Will, who’s obviously his target right now. She’s not sure she wants to get in the middle of this. Pazzi reminds her of Jack Crawford but all wrong – the same sharp eyes, but the mind behind them beginning to fracture. He’s keeping a lid on it, but she can smell his desperation. “You especially, Signore Graham.”

“I’m not sure how well I could be expected to know someone who put a knife though my stomach.” Will’s obviously bullshitting him; he doesn’t trust Pazzi any more than she does. He steps away from the alter and the Investigator, wandering over to the side of the chapel, where the floor dips down. Abigail follows him, keeping him between her and Pazzi as unobtrusively as possible.

“He sent you his heart,” Pazzi points out – _smart_ , Abigail worries –  “Where has he gone now?” Will doesn’t even glance at him. Suddenly Abigail realises something is wrong – he’s gone deathly pale, eyes wide and face soft with shock, an echo of the look he’d worn in Hannibal’s kitchen, that last bloody night. His gaze is fixed, unwavering, on the doors that lead down to the catacombs.

“Oh shit.” Abigail doesn’t mean to say it – she rarely swears anymore – but it slips out as the enormity of his realisation washes through her.

“He hasn’t gone anywhere.” Will’s voice is as sure and quiet as footsteps in a dark hallway. “He’s still here.”

Pazzi takes a step back, fear flashing across his face. Abigail only realises she’s taken a step _forward_ , towards the doors, when Will’s hand comes up in front of her.

“Abigail, stay up here.”

“What?” She rounds on him, trying to stay calm and controlled even with her heart rabbiting and her muscles winding tight as bow strings. “Why?”

“Signorina, please.” Pazzi butts in, hands out to soothe her like she’s some sort of wild animal, “Signor Graham is right. This man is incredibly dangerous.”

Abigail doesn’t bother replying to that. “Will, what the hell?”

Will takes her by the shoulder, tugs her far enough away from Pazzi to maintain some little bit of privacy. “You remember how last time you saw him, he wanted to kill you, right?”

“I also remember having to hold your guts in because he eviscerated you, and yet you’re somehow totally fine to go down there?” God, she’d thought Will would know better than this by now. She’s almost twenty, for fuck’s sake, and she’s survived the attention of two separate serial killers.

Will takes her other shoulder, pressing down like he’s trying to loosen them. “He only wanted to hurt me. Job done. You, he wanted to kill – maybe still does. I can’t take that risk, Abigail.”

 _“You_ can’t take that risk? It’s my risk, Will, not yours.”

“Please, okay? Just for now, just for me. Please.”

She looks into her friend’s haunted eyes, past them, and remembers blinking awake in the middle last night to see him sitting up in bed, sweaty and staring, eyes fixed on her. He must have had another nightmare, and she’d bet dollars to dimes it was her dying again. She does that a lot, in Will’s nightmares.

The reminder of how much he genuinely cares about her softens her anger, just a little. Enough to remember that Pazzi is still here, and that he’d probably be happy to chuck both of them in a cell if he thought they were straying too close to the boundaries of acceptable murderer-chasing, and keep them there until he got something that would help him catch Hannibal. Whatever she and Will want out of Hannibal, neither of them want someone else to get him first.

“Just for now,” she tells him, trying to make it clear this won’t be happening again, but the sheer relief in Will’s eyes softens the sting of feeling so babied. It occurs to Abigail that if Will never learns to trust Hannibal with her safety, a lot of avenues currently open to them are going to close pretty quickly.

Never mind. They can talk about that later.

Will gives her shoulders one last squeeze, more for his own benefit than hers, then he lets go and strides towards the door to the crypt, shoulders straight and a shadow fallen over his face. Pazzi casts an odd look at Abigail, something between worried and assessing, before following him.

Left alone, Abigail sits back down on the steps and wraps her arms around her shins. It’s unlikely Will is going to find Hannibal anyway, and even less likely that Hannibal is going to say anything to him. It’s too early, they’ve only just arrived, and whatever game Hannibal is playing with them, he’s going to want to draw out. He’ll want to be sure of them before he makes his next move.

But she’s certain Will was right, and that for the moment Hannibal is still here somewhere; he’d have stayed to watch them see his gift, to see if they could understand it. And with that man’s sense of the dramatic, Abigail doesn’t see how he could have resisted lurking in the catacombs.

Like Hades, she thinks, and snorts when she realises this makes Will Persephone. She doubts he’d like that comparison.

A cloud passes over the sun, just for a moment, casting deep shadow on the Capella doors, and realisation hits Abigail like a bullet.

Throwing herself up, she sprints across the stone floor and out the doors. The sunlight bursts bright across her eyes after so long in the chapel’s quiet shade, but it’s like she’s in a bubble, everything in the world rolling off her and falling away as she runs. The sun and the people don’t touch her. She knows exactly where she’s going.

Will might have been happy to go straight to their hotel when they’d docked in Palermo, but Abigail had wanted to stretch her legs a bit. She’d taken one of those guided tours around the city, on a whim, and enjoyed it more than she’d thought she would. The guy running it had flirted with her in that friendly way Italians do, and when she’d mentioned being interested in the more hidden, underground areas of the town, he’d taken her aside at the end of the tour and shown her a small black door, tucked into the side of an old, worn-looking apartment building a little way from the Catacombe dei Cappuccini.

“A secret exit from the parts of the Catacombe the public can’t see,” he’d told her, eyes shining with a good story, “so the ghosts can come and go as they please.” Abigail had leaned in, encouraging his conspiratorial tone and keeping her eyes appropriately wide. She hasn’t thought much of it at the time, hadn’t really even believed him, but she remembers now and she’s suddenly certain.

It can’t take her more than three minutes, but she’s breathless by the time she hits the Via Cappuccini, still running as fast as she can manage even as her muscles burn. She’s only a couple of blocks away when the little black door opens, and a man in a leather jacket slips through it.

His hair is ungelled, his skin tanned, even his gait is different. But she sees him. She knows him.

Hannibal looks up, and their eyes meet, and everything else just…goes. The cars, the sun, the tourists and the screaming gulls all vanish, and it’s just the two of them, like it hasn’t been for eight whole months. Something electric runs over Abigail’s skin, burning through it and into her blood.

She looks at Hannibal, and Hannibal looks at her, and even from this far away, even with Hannibal’s affect, she can see his lips curve up, ever so slightly.

He’s pleased to see her. Despite everything, that feels stupidly good.

A cab pulls up to the sidewalk by Hannibal, and he leans in to give the driver an address. With one last glance up at her, one last tiny Hannibal smile, he gets in.

Abigail doesn’t call out, or run to him, or try and stop him. The thought never even crosses her mind. She just stands there and watches as the cab pulls away from the curb and vanishes into the stream of traffic flowing to the Corso Calatafimi.

Sense filters back in slowly; the sun is still warm on her face, she’s uncomfortably sweaty and still panting from her sprint, the people around her are still walking and chatting and laughing and eating ice cream, like nothing’s happened – because nothing has, not really. They didn’t even wave at each other. Abigail has no reason to feel so…struck.

A buzz from her jacket pocket makes her flinch violently, enough to earn a sideways glance from the family passing her on the sidewalk. Shaking her head at herself, she answers her phone – only one other person has her number these days.

“Abigail,” Will says. He sounds agitated, jumpy, as fucked up as she feels. Did he see Hannibal too, down there in the dark with the bones? Did he actually get to speak to him? “Where the hell did you go?”

“I just thought…”Abigail looks around, at the strangers walking around her, all the cars driving past and away, and suddenly registers that she’s completely alone. Hannibal’s gone, Will’s not here, nobody else knows where or who she is. “Never mind. Did you see him?”

Will’s exhale is deep and rattling, a rush of static against her ear. “No. Come on, let’s meet back to the hotel. I think we’re done here.”

After agreeing and hanging up, Abigail takes one last long look at the black door. Idly, she considers opening it, walking through. She’s still overheated and sweaty; the cool darkness would feel so nice against her skin. She could just keep walking, through Palermo’s hidden skeleton, come out in the Capella or somewhere she’s never been before, or never come out at all.

It takes a surprising degree of effort to put the idea aside.

 

~~~

 

Will’s already back in their hotel room by the time she gets there, pacing up and down. His whole body is crackling with nerves; it reminds her of Port Haven, of the old Will.

“He was there,” he says, as soon as she walks in the door. “No, I didn’t see him, but I could, I could feel him. Like the darkness was connecting us as it touched us both. He was there and he heard me.”

“Heard you say what?”

“I told him I forgave him.”

That…she hadn’t expected that. “Do you?”

“Yes. Yes, I think, at this point.” Will sighs, from deep in his lungs, collapses to sit on his bed and looks up at her. There’s something lost and half-broken in his eyes. “That’s worrying, isn’t it?”

Abigail sits on the bed beside him, bouncing slightly. “What’s the alternative? You could go back to Wolf Trap and the FBI and spend the rest of your life renouncing Hannibal, and we both know it wouldn’t change anything about what you feel.”

That gets a laugh, sardonic and shaky. “I have no idea how I feel anymore; how are you so sure about it?” His voice carries an edge of cruelty, but Abigail understands. Will’s been repressing in one form or another since Hannibal got him shut in the BSHCI. Examining his feelings would mean actually facing up to them, and she doesn’t think he’s ready to handle that yet.

“You were the one who said I was empathetic. We don’t get to choose our emotions, our wants or needs. We can choose what we do with them, but that doesn’t make them go away. Isn’t it better to be honest with yourself?”

“Radical honesty? Is that what Hannibal was teaching you?” Will raises an eyebrow. “Because that would be, uh, slightly hypocritical.”

“Hannibal taught me a lot, but I figured that one out for myself.” She’d had so much time, in the cliff house, in the long stretches between Hannibal’s visits. Time to think, cry, come to some sort of terms with everything. “Besides, Hannibal might lie to everyone else, but he’s always honest with himself.”

Will blinks, then sits up straighter, face smoothing out. “Are you sure about that? Because I’m not.”

“What do you mean?”

“I don’t blame you for not seeing it. Hannibal doesn’t see it himself – he can’t. There’s no way he could continue to be as he is and stop lying to himself.”

Abigail raises her hands – much as she hates to admit it, Will’s lost her. He’s made a leap somewhere, she can see that, she just can’t always follow him. One day, maybe. “Okay, slow down. What’s Hannibal lying about?”

Will shakes his head and gets up to pace. The shocky, shaky energy he’d had when she came in is falling away, something sharper and more precise taking its place. “Maybe not lying, so much as omitting. Hiding. There are places in his mind that he can’t go, not safely. You said he was wounded, staggering. I think I understand that now.” Abigail wonders if he’s talking to her or himself, but then he turns his head to her. “Did you know he had a sister?”

“No, I didn’t. Is she…”

“Dead. When they were children, I think. He lost her, and that…it changed him.”

“Do you think it made him – like he is?”

Will smiles, a dark, sad twist of his lips. “Probably didn’t help. He loved her. I don’t think he ever loved anyone before he loved her. And then when she died, he grieved, and he’d never done that before either. Mischa may have been the first thing in the world that really touched him.”

“We touched him. You and me.” _Mostly you, though,_ she can’t help but think, and buries the though immediately. She doesn’t think he sees it, this time at least.

“We did, and then I betrayed him. And then he hurt me, and he was going to…” Will stops suddenly, like something’s just occurred to him, and flicks a quick glance at her, there and gone.

He’s never liked bringing up her almost-deaths, but there’s something about his pause that sets her a little on edge. Whatever leap he’s made this time, it stops him, leaves him staring off into space silently,

“So what’s the plan now?” She asks, to cover her sudden unease

At the sound of her voice Will seems to come back to himself, turning to her and perching on the bed again. “There’s no point looking for him in Palermo, he’ll be gone by now. Italy is the right place, I’m sure of it, but we don’t have the resources or connections to search a whole country for one man, even a man as singular as Hannibal.”

“We’ve got something the other people looking don’t, though. We know him.”

“We knew him in Baltimore,” Will replies, shaking his head. “Right now he’s not the same man, or the same monster. He’s adapting, evolving, becoming something different.”

“But we’re not giving up.” Abigail doesn’t dare to phrase that as a question, suddenly too scared that Will would see it as reluctance.

“No, no, we’re definitely not giving up. We tore down Hannibal’s walls, and he’s rebuilding them from the ground up.” He turns to her again, meets her eyes, and she can see the light of purpose in them. Will may have made a career of lying to himself, but something inside him must know, must be certain. Sometimes Abigail looks at him and sees a pile of iron shavings slowly being pulled into alignment, pointing towards their magnetic north. She wonders if he can feel them inside him, tugging at him. Blood is full of iron, after all. “If we want to get to know him better, we should go back to the start.”

“His start.”

“The place he can’t go.” Will is smiling again, bright and sharp as mirror shards, and Abigail can feel her face stretching into the same shape, the same savage pleasure. “Home.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The Capuchin catacombs in Palermo are real, though the bit open to the public is a lot less dramatic looking than in the show. The secret exit onto the Via Cappuccini is almost certainly not real, but hey ho.

**Author's Note:**

> Do I have a nice, well-laid-out plot for this story? Yes, actually, for once. Are the other chapters written yet? no. Is there an updating schedule? Don't make me laugh.
> 
> Title and chapter titles from Various Storms and Saints by Florence and the Machine.


End file.
